DOES RENEWABLE ENERGY RESHAPE THE RESOURCE ENVIRONMENTAL DEGRADATION NEXUS? EVIDENCE FROM RESOURCE INTENSIVE ASIAN ECONOMIES

Abstract

Are the adversative environmental impacts of natural-resource reliance being reduced by renewable energy? The present study investigates the linkage among natural-resource rents, renewable-energy, and CO₂ emissions in the nine resource-intensive Asian economies in the period 1995–2022. The analysis uses balanced panel data, and fixed effects with Driscoll–Kraay standard errors as the main estimator and CS-ARDL as a robustness framework are employed. The outcomes show that the relation between renewable-energy and CO₂ emissions is still strong. In contrast, emissions are not significantly influenced by natural-resource rents directly. More crucially, natural resource rent–renewable energy interaction is statistically unimportant, which suggests that there is no strong evidence that renewable energy declines the natural resource rent–emissions relationship. The CS-ARDL results support an adjustment process; the long-run coefficients are not statistically significant. Overall, the outcomes indicate that renewable energy makes a direct contribution to the reduction of emissions, and that there is still a need for larger structural transformation to achieve a separation between the resources and their impact on the environment.